3.7. Run Your Version Of Wireshark

[Tip]Beware of multiple Wiresharks

An already installed Wireshark may interfere with your newly generated version in various ways. If you have any problems getting your Wireshark running the first time, it might be a good idea to remove the previously installed version first.

3.7.1. Unix-Like Platforms

After a successful build you can run Wireshark right from the run directory. There’s no need to install it first.

$ ./run/wireshark

There’s no need to run Wireshark as root user, but depending on your platform you might not be able to capture. Running Wireshark this way can be helpful since debugging output will be displayed in your terminal. You can also change Wireshark’s behavior by setting various environment variables. See the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES section of the Wireshark man page for more details.

On macOS, Wireshark is built as an application bundle (run/Wireshark.app) by default, and run/wireshark will be a wrapper script that runs Wireshark.app/Contents/MacOS/Wireshark. Along with running ./run/wireshark as shown above you can also run it on the command line with open run/Wireshark.app.

3.7.2. Windows Native

By default the CMake-generated Visual C++ project places all of the files necessary to run Wireshark in the subdirectory run\RelWithDebInfo. As with the Unix-like build described above, you can run Wireshark from the build directory without installing it first.

> .\run\RelWithDebInfo\Wireshark